Tuesday, May 16, 2017

When I was a kid, my dad possessed an immense fondness for the old World War Two slogan, "Loose lips sink ships."

Normally, our family didn't discuss matters of national security at the dinner table. We took the quip as an admonition to refrain from gossip, and Dad repeated the line so frequently, that we inevitably responded with the standard-issue sarcastic teenage eye roll.

I haven't written much about politics recently, but five minutes ago, I hung up with a nice young man who answered the phone at my Congressman's office.

I asked him, "What else can I do to make sure we get a special prosecutor to look into Russia-Trump collusion and Trump's Russian financial entanglements? A Congressional investigation no longer feels like enough, when we have a president who blithely compromises the lives of our agents and the lives of our allies' agents, along with the lives of any civilians inclined to help our armed forces abroad, to a hostile world power."

(Head desk.)

The young man in the Congressman's office said, "Ask your friends to call both their senators and their congressional representatives, and ask them to KEEP CALLING."

Congressional offices log constituent calls every day. Give your address. Make it clear you are a constituent, and you want your elected representatives in Washington to demand a special prosecutor. If they're already beating this drum, thank them. If they're hedging, urge them to put the republic over party.

Let's make their phones ring.

Russia is not our friend. This is not tricky math.

Russia guns down writers and political dissidents in the public streets. Russia jails protesters in Siberian gulags. Russia seizes assets of private companies whose executives piss off their dictator and then, often, Russia kills those business leaders for good measure. Russia poisons its exiled opposition leaders to try to silence them. Russia annexes land belonging to sovereign neighboring countries. Russia props up Bashar al-Assad and his henchmen, helping them gas children and bomb their country to kingdom come.

This latest aspect of the ongoing Russia Scandal makes Watergate look likes child's play, and unlike Watergate, where the Washington Post had the story months before anyone could corroborate the allegations, both the New York Times and Reuters had independently corroborated the details of the classified information leak by the president to the Russians last night.

Either the president is truly in Putin's pocket, or he's too stupid to understand the consequences of his boastful loose lips.

Either way, it's dangerous for the American people, our armed forces, and our allies. We all deserve so much better.

The traitor president's words might not sink an actual ship this time, but they could get our intelligence assets abroad beheaded, if the CIA and our allies cannot act quickly enough to protect their people.

Incidentally, I took a stab at writing political suspense once, involving collusion with the Russians, no less. I could not have made this level of crap up.

Why? Because nobody would have believed it, even in a fictional, chase caper/thriller context. What the Washington Post reported last night is just too mind-boggling to put in a contemporary novel.

So, Dad, I know you read this space. You were right: Loose lips do sink ships.